Highway Expansion - Creating Tomorrows Transportation Problems Today

Front Range Population Growth and

Recreational Travel Demand

The Front Range is growing at 3 times the national average. With this growth, peak travel demand will outpace highway capacity at an alarming rate.

Courtesy of DRCOG

Recreational travel is the dominant use for the I-70 Mountain Corridor. Recreational travel is highly elastic, which means that recreational travelers have a choice relating to their travel plans. Unlike commuters, they can choose to travel for recreation when they want to instead of five days every week to go to work to keep food on the table. When the cost of travel becomes too great, either in expenses (price of motor vehicle insurance, fuel, maintenance, tolls, parking, etc.) or in terms of travel time (including frustration, safety and convenience) recreational travelers can choose not to travel. When the cost is reduced by either lowering expenses or adding capacity, safety and convenience, recreational travelers will choose to travel again.

In the Front Range there is currently a significant amount of suppressed demand (that is recreational travelers that avoid Mountain Corridor travel during the growing peak periods due to traffic and congestion). When I-70 lanes are added, suppressed Front Range recreational travel demand will be liberated and fill the new highway capacity almost immediately.

In the I-70 Mountain Corridor, we would need to add lanes every 2 to 5 years to keep up with projected travel demand growth and then grow lanes on US40, SH9, US6, US285, SH91, US24 and other arterials and local roads in conjunction with I-70 growth in order to prevent complete gridlock once motorists exit I-70.

In essence, in order to keep up with Colorado population growth and travel demand using a single transportation mode (private vehicles on highways); between roads and parking lots, we would literally need to pave over our wonderful mountains and mountain communities to keep traffic moving. The resulting back country sprawl would be appalling to most Coloradans.

Instead of “solving” congestion, more highway capacity actually encourages the construction of new low-density, single-use development in more remote locations. In these new communities, destinations are farther apart, requiring us to drive longer distances and more often than in traditional more compact, mixed communities. This “generated traffic” quickly fills up the highways again.

There is also a distinct difference between recreational activities driven by highway development and transit development. Recreation trips associated with rail transit in the mountain corridor are anticipated to include an increase in resort guided activities and activities within developed recreational sites. Recreation trips associated with highway expansion would result in an increase in dispersed recreational activities, effectively creating recreational sprawl.

Today, progressive transportation agencies at every level (federal, state, county and municipal) are looking to other ways of dealing with congestion. Instead of focusing on how fast cars can move through a particular place (mobility), DOTs are thinking about how easy it is to reach destinations (access) – by car, as well as by transit, bike or foot.

Mountain Resort destination access by public transportation, bicycle and by foot needs to be a priority in addressing the transportation solution for the I-70 Mountain Corridor. The common assertion that we can build our way out of I-70 highway congestion by adding more lanes is totally absurd.

Shifting Gears: The Joy of (Not Always) Driving

by Jeremy Sinek

Autonet.ca (http://autonet.ca/), an online Canadian automobile magazine.

Since you’re reading this magazine, I’m going to make a giant leap of logic and assume that you love cars and you enjoy driving.

Not for you the notion of a motor vehicle as merely an appliance or “a tool, personal transportation, for the use of.” Cars, to you, are intrinsically interesting. Driving is an act of emotion, not mere motion.

That being the case, I have a proposal that may shock you.

Drive less.

Am I nuts? The editor of a car magazine telling people to cut back on the driving? No, I’m serious: if you’re serious about how much you like to drive, do it less.

What this planet needs more than anything is fewer cars on the road. We need fewer cars crashing into each other, cleaner air in our cities, less carbon dioxide heating up the planet. We need to reduce our dependence on the foreign sources of oil over which future wars may be fought.

At the same time, what we of the auto-enthusiast persuasion need is more quality in our driving, not quantity.

Put these two needs together and what we have is an opportunity for enlightened self-interest. If we’re going to benefit from reduced traffic, we who like to drive will have to do our part. But there are personal spin-off benefits from leaving the car at home, say, one or two days a week. And on the days we do drive, we’ll enjoy it that much more.

On many of North America’s busiest highways, traffic already grinds along so slowly that it would be literally faster to ride a bike to work. How much longer before walking becomes the faster alternative?

It’s not an issue only of journey times. The greater the traffic congestion, the nastier the driving experience becomes. The fact that you have zero opportunity to enjoy your car’s scalpel-sharp steering and spine crushing acceleration is the least of it. Stop and go driving is tedious, frustrating and mentally draining. Hell on your car, too.

Worse, you’re trapped in the company of people behaving badly. The heavier the congestion, the worse the behaviour. I don’t know about you, but I normally go a long way to avoid being near aggressive, selfish, boorish people who get what they want by pushing and shoving.

Don’t think you’re exempt if you’re the one who’s behaving badly. What do you think is happening to your stress levels, to your heart rate, every time you cut off another driver so that maybe you can get home seven tenths of a second earlier than if you had stayed in the other lane? Of course, if that’ s the way you drive the chances are you’re also blowing a wad every year in traffic tickets and inflated insurance premiums.

Let’s face it, this whole concept of personal mobility that the automobile represents is a wondrous privilege and luxury that we abuse and misuse shamefully. And I don’t mean misuse in the sense of driving badly, though Lord knows there’s enough of that going around. I mean it in the sense of driving inappropriately; driving when you really should not be driving.

Last Saturday night - a warm, dry night in early May - a neighbour invited us to their house party. My wife and I walked the entire 150 metres to get there. Two other guests, each of whom lives less than 300 metres from the venue, drove to the party.

C’mon folks, this is not OK!

Another example. Go to any mall, and even in the nicest of weather you will see drivers circling around looking for parking as close as possible to the mall entrance. Sometimes people even get into fights over empty parking spots. Meanwhile, maybe 100 metres further away, there’s acres of empty parking. People spend five minutes burning gas and spewing emissions so they can save themselves a one-minute walk.

Then there are all those rugged, outdoorsy SUV drivers. Have you noticed how it always seems to be SUVs parked illegally in the fire lane right outside the mall entrance because their “active-lifestyle” (pah!) drivers are too lazy to walk 50 or 100 metres from a legitimate parking spot?

Or how about this for the height of absurdity? Suppose we need a to pick up carton of milk or rent a movie. We put on our $200 “athletic” shoes, brush past the bicycle in the garage to get into the car, and drive to the plaza 0.9 kilometres away. If we think about it at all, maybe we justify it to ourselves in terms of time saved.

But then, maybe later that same day, we get into the car again and drive a few kilometres to the fitness club, for which we pay hundreds of dollars a year in membership. There, we spend the next hour or two doing totally artificial exercise on a bicycle or a treadmill going absolutely nowhere. And on the way home afterwards we stop to fill up our tank and bitch about the price of gasoline.

Now you tell me who’s nuts.

(Here’s a thought: imagine how much energy could be saved and pollution avoided if every exercise machine in every gym was hooked up to a generator that fed electricity back into the hydro grid. Remember, you read it here first). [Bodzin replies: I’ve looked into this, and it wouldn’t even produce enough electricity to power the lights, cash registers, computers, and sound system in the gym. Human locomotion is so low-energy, it’s on a totally different scale from the vehicle and electric-grid world we get used to.]

Quite aside from oil crunches and global warming, there’s another crisis facing our western lifestyles: growing levels of obesity and declining physical fitness. Surveys show that not only are we getting fatter, so are our kids.

Could there be a connection between the obesity epidemic, dirty air, global warming ... and the number of mothers I see every morning chauffeuring their 1.7 children to neighbourhood schools in nine-seater Chevrolet Suburbans? D’ya think?